Why We Left Islam (24 page)

In other words, the Islamic threat existed far before the modern nation of Israel or America existed. In fact, as a few of the former Muslims in this book have cited, the universally accepted sacred traditions of Islam have declared from the very beginning that the day of resurrection cannot come until faithful Muslims carry out a final holocaust against the Jewish people. Is this ancient sacred tradition to be blamed on the state of Israel? At the time of its “inspiration,” the Jewish people had no nation to call their own. Yet the anti-Semitic spirit of Islam existed even back then.

This relentless anti-Semitic spirit was perhaps articulated nowhere better than from the lips of Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of the Hezbollah movement in Lebanon, when he said in October of 2002, “If Jews all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide.”
²
Is America to blame for this desire to kill all Jews? Or radical Islam’s apparent fascination with Adolf Hitler? Indeed, Hitler’s
Mein Kempf
has been a bestseller in many Arab nations for more than a decade, especially in Palestine. Given this deep-rooted hatred of Israel and the U.S., is it possible that the attacks on September 11 had nothing to do with our U.S. foreign policy but was simply an attack on America—the largest Christian nation in the world—on the anniversary of the defeat of the Muslim armies by Christendom at the gates of Vienna?

Returning now to the question asked earlier regarding the inherent goodness or evil of Islam. What if—despite our deepest hopes and wishes—Islam is not, at its core, a basically good, peaceful, and tolerant religion? What if Islam at its core is actually very similar to Nazism or any number of other misguided or even evil belief systems and does in fact want to dominate the world? What if Islam has in its foundation many things that are diametrically opposed to freedom of speech, freedom of choice, freedom of expression—or just plain freedom in general? What if the claim that Islam has been hijacked by radicals is not actually true, but instead, the radicals are actually the ones who are most accurately and faithfully following the core tenets of Islam? What if an objective study of Islam showed this to be the case?

As we read through several of these stories, there is a common thread: None were politically correct. Why is this? Why is it that when we try to discern and discuss the true nature of Islam, that we are quick to listen to those who only discuss Islam in positive or glowing terms, but we refuse to believe the conclusions of those scholars who have spent a lifetime studying Islam and who have concluded just the opposite? Or more importantly, why would we be quick to reject the real and very personal stories of the actual people who were both born and raised in Islam? Why is it that the picture that is painted in the many stories told in this book is not one that is even considered by many in the media or the educational system? Why until now have we chosen to put political correctness above mere reality? And now, having heard the warnings presented here, will we choose to continue to bow in mindless devotion to the altar of political correctness or will we choose to heed the warnings of these courageous living witnesses?

AFTERWORD

W
HERE
T
O
F
ROM
H
ERE
?
BY G
REGORY
M. D
AVIS

T
HOSE WHO HAVE SEEN ISLAM from the inside know better than anyone its true colors. It is their testimonies—more than the politically correct sophistry of contemporary Western commentators—that we must heed if we are to survive the resurgence of Islam on the world stage. The mounting news accounts of apparently unrelated acts of violence, “unrest,” and terrorism from around the world alarm many, but few possess the patience or clarity of thought to bring such apparently disparate events into focus. In fact, the overwhelming preponderance of organized violence on the world stage today—from Nigeria to Thailand, from Bosnia to Bali, from Chechnya to the Philippines, from Sudan to Indonesia, from Israel to Kashmir, to Paris, London, Madrid, Moscow, Washington, and New York—has its roots in the simple faith of Mohammad.

Across the globe, now as in Islam’s heyday (from roughly the Muslim invasions of the Holy Land and Spain in the seventh and eighth centuries A.D. to the Turks’ near-capture of Vienna at the end of the seventeenth), Islamic
jihad
is making itself felt. While there is no “central command” that orchestrates the global
jihad
, there is a common playbook: the Qur’an and the life and example of Mohammad, the
Sunnah
. If the West continues to misunderstand this basic fact, there can be little hope that it will take the necessary measures of self-defense. We are not threatened merely by the occasional terrorist but by a cohesive ideology, which for a thousand years threatened to overwhelm the West and managed to overcome other civilizations manifestly more advanced than itself. Ask the Persians or the Byzantines.

Much today is written and verbalized about terrorism, but little about Islam itself. We must understand that terrorism as such is not the enemy. Islam is not terrorism and terrorism is not Islam. Terrorism is a tactic to destabilize a political order and, ultimately, replace it with something else. There is no substitute to discerning the ultimate objectives of one’s adversary. It is the goal of Islamic terrorism that we must come to understand if we are to counter it. Like the casual use of “religion,” the flinging about of “terrorism” serves to obscure the specifically Islamic nature of the problem. The
jihadis
’ goal is not a united Ireland or an end to animal testing but the realization of the global order of Allah,
Sharia
law, as dictated by their holy book and the example of their Prophet. We must be willing to get our hands dirty in the sources of Islamic inspiration—the Qur’an and the
Sunnah
—if we are to respond effectively to Islam’s war against us.

The reasons that an individual Muslim will one day awaken to the call of
jihad
are surely as varied as individuals themselves. In any ideological community, there will always be a subset of true believers willing to sacrifice themselves for their beliefs. This subset moves and draws strength from immersion in a sympathetic milieu of other, perhaps less orthodox, faithful. The great mass of believers need not practice, or even subscribe to, the full tenets of their faith to afford a space in which true believers can and will. And it is these true believers who serve as the community’s vanguard in its efforts to realize its ultimate goals. Why are there so few “moderate” Muslim voices? Precisely because they would necessarily clash with the voices of their orthodox coreligionists who, in any Islamic context, must get the better part of the argument. While there may have been many “moderate” Mensheviks in the early Communist movement, it was inevitable, in light of the very assumptions of Communist ideology, that the more ruthless Bolsheviks would gain the upper hand. The upshot is that, as the general Muslim population in the West continues to grow—and its growth is only being encouraged by the Western secular powers—so will its nuclei of true-believing
jihadis
.

It is important to realize that the subversion of Western secular government by the
Sharia
agenda may be furthered through means
other than terrorism. In the West, Muslim activists are increasingly availing themselves of other, legal forms of subversion and intimidation. Those for whom the ends justify the means can readily force an open society, which extends the benefit of the doubt as a matter of course, back on its heels. One of the ongoing debates in Muslim communities, both in the Islamic world and in the West, is whether a more Fabian strategy would serve the long-term
jihad
better than the bin Laden approach. Already, substantial parts of major European cities—Paris, London, Rotterdam, Malmo—are effectively ruled by
Sharia
law, enforced by local imams and their true-believing followers. And while Islam continues to grow in leaps and bounds, the native European populations are collapsing, a trend that has been underway for decades. Never in the history of the world has a materially sated civilization simply refused to reproduce. It seems that Europe, having jettisoned its Christian spirituality in order to glory the more in this life, is finding it difficult even to stay alive.

But to those ensconced in the halls of power, it is unimaginable that the edifice of modern civilization could be seriously threatened by an ancient religion from the wastelands of Arabia—an attitude one might have found in Cairo, Antioch, Persia, Spain, Constantinople, and countless other places before they were overrun by Mohammad’s “primitive” followers. We must bear in mind that, for most of the past thirteen centuries, Europe and Christendom had to battle for their lives against Islamic imperialism. At times, it was a close-run thing. However permanent it may seem, the relative quiet we have enjoyed on the Islam front since the Roman Catholic victory at Vienna on September 11, 1683—a day on the calendar to be remembered forever for a victory of a very different sort—is more the exception than the rule. We are not today facing Arab or Ottoman armies massing at the gates; rather we are witnessing the transformation from within of Western centers of strength into Islamic centers of power, permitted by a ruling class if not actually collaborationist then at least criminally incompetent. Political struggles invariably subtend factors of both capacity and will; while weaker in the former, Islam’s
growing confidence—its
faith
—more than makes up for it in the latter.

While, on the one hand, Islam possesses the dynamism and staying power of a major religious faith, it shares the political objectives of modern totalitarian projects such as Communism and National Socialism—an exceptionally dangerous combination. Like Communism and National Socialism, Islam seeks the conquest and submission of territory to a particular political and legal regime, in its case,
Sharia
law. Like Communism and National Socialism, Islam divides the world into two warring spheres, one intrinsically good, the other evil.
Dar al-Islam
, the House of Islam, is the territory enlightened by
Sharia
law;
dar al-harb
, the House of War, the rest of the world upon which war is to be made until it is brought permanently into the
Sharia
fold. It is one of the great ironies of our time that tremendous political energy is expended on keeping Western public life thoroughly sanitized of the West’s traditional religion, Christianity, while Islam, an ideology that
explicitly
conflates—or rather never distinguishes in the first place—between the political and the religious, is blithely allowed in through the front door.

Despite its political nature, Islam continues to shelter under the rubric “religion,” a vague, sentimental term used to forestall rigorous inquiry into the thing itself. Among elite circles today, “religion” connotes quaint mythologies and rituals of more primitive, and therefore morally unimpeachable, peoples. (The exception, of course, is Christianity, the white man’s perennial instrument of tyranny.) The “orientalism” decried by that scourge of honest scholarship, Edward Said, is more alive today in the minds of his intellectual progeny than anywhere in the more serious Western scholarship of days gone by.

One of the difficulties for Westerners in coming to grips with the Islamic danger is that, since the French Revolution, the dangers that have threatened the West on a civilizational scale have arisen from within its own intellectual traditions. Communism and National Socialism, for example, were tumorous growths that perverted aspects of Western thought to catastrophic lengths. Such “-isms” of modernity are rightly characterized as “extreme,”
having distorted the West’s own traditions of communal and national ideals. But such labels have little meaning in the context of Islam, an ideology with a decidedly non-Western pedigree. In the struggles against Communism and National Socialism, the healthful part of the Western organism managed to beat back the disease, and has since built up immunity to such forms of political cancer. But like the effects of chemotherapy, the treatment, while fighting the malignance, has enfeebled the body. The hypersensitivity in the West today—especially in Western Europe—to anything invocative of national pride or civilizational identity has crippled its ability to assert the legitimacy of its own traditions against those who would destroy them. The danger today comes not from some new perversion of the Western tradition but from an alien ideology whose lineage stems not from Athens and Jerusalem but Mecca and Medina. As usual, many are still fighting the last war.

But the most salient manifestations of the Islamic tradition today, the terrorist and the suicide bomber, are no “extreme” distortions of a benign Islamic tradition; rather they are manifestations of that tradition itself. The “-ism” that political correctitude requires appended to “Islam” and “
jihad
” whenever there is mention of Muslims and violence is both entirely redundant and fundamentally misleading. Unlike the case of true Western radicals, there is no hope of recapturing Islam’s true believers back into the Western fold; there is no error to be corrected that will set them back on their true, benign path. The gravest mistake of the West today is its insistent hope in a fictive “moderate” Islam.

The persistent myth of a peaceful Islam, which lacks any doctrinal or historical basis, serves to forestall any decisive remedial action and, if not soon relinquished, will doom both the West and those individual Muslims susceptible to transformation. The only “peace” afforded with respect to Islam derives from a calculation of force: either overwhelming superior force, which keeps Islamic predations contained, or abject surrender, which slates the
jihad.
The prime fault of the progressive Western mind is ever to look toward what might be rather than to accept what is. Islam is what it is: a violent, expansionary political program with aspirations of
world conquest. If it ever transforms into something else, it will not be by virtue of infidel hopes and blandishments, however earnest.